Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away. Archive.
Showing 15 posts tagged smartphones
Hard to tell which is dumber: the article or New York’s Attorney General.
It sure sounds like he’s not going to be happy until every smartphone is a remote detonation device. And if that happened, he’d probably sue the companies for making weapons of mass destruction.
The Japan Times:
Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.
Yeah, that won’t work. But you know what will? Doing the opposite: putting the excellent Nintendo games on smartphones.
Gerry Smith reporting on the undercover cops in San Francisco using iPhones to lure would-be criminals:
As the officers stand up and head for their squad cars, Garrity issues one last order: “Try not to lose the fucking phones!”
Crazy:
Given that nearly half of San Francisco residents own an iPhone — the highest rate of any city in the nation — this stolen phone bazaar amounts to a crucial conduit in an illicit, increasingly global trade.
Crazier:
Nearly half of all robberies in San Francisco last year involved smartphones, according to police.
We believe in getting away from the spec wars that are just about specs and not about consumers. That’s the simple way out: spec, spec, spec. I don’t think that’s the answer.
Jim Wicks, Motorola’s design chief, to PCMAG (an absolute turd of a website, by the way).
High-res
Yeah Yeah Yeahs Post Sign at Concert Asking Fans to Put Away Phones & Cameras During Show
Fightin’ words. (Meanwhile, I saw about 1,000 Instagrams and Vines from this very show.)
John Gruber:
By profit share, on the other hand, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley, last year Apple took 69 percent of the handset industry’s profits; Samsung took 34. For just the last quarter, the numbers were 72 percent for Apple, 29 for Samsung. You will note that both the annual and quarterly numbers total more than 100 percent; that is because all other handset makers, combined, are losing money. This is rather astounding — Apple and Samsung have together destroyed the rest of the mobile handset industry.
Great piece on defining “winning” and “losing” in the smartphone space. You’d think the amount of money a company makes would be a good metric since it ensures long-term viability of said company. But most of the tech press seems to feel otherwise. Because they’re bored.
You know that amazing photo you saw everywhere a few days ago… Emi Kolawole of The Washington Post:
Post photojournalist Nick Kirkpatrick did a little digging and found that the lower photo (shown below this paragraph), which features a sea of smartphones and tablets, was, indeed, taken during the announcement of Pope Francis’s election. But the top photo (shown above), which shows an audience with far fewer gadgets was taken during the funeral procession of Pope John Paul II — a very different mood and event type. There was no one addressing the crowd from the balcony, for example. So, the comparison isn’t quite accurate.
We’ll call it correct in spirit, though.
[via scifi451]
The world thought Apple (in Model-T terms) was entering 1925. Now it thinks early 1926 may be closer to the mark.
Nokia usually isn’t in a place to talk when it comes to mobile competition — unless the target of its mockery is BlackBerry.
A crippled man tries to trip a man with no legs; fails.
Henry Blodget isn’t sure. I’m not either. But I do know that my father is in that camp.
Over the holiday weekend, my dad revealed that he recently got an Android phone. Not because he wanted one, mind you, but because his old flip-phone broke and the Verizon rep heavily pushed an Android device on him. He agreed as it was free.
So what does he use it for? To make calls. And to take a few pictures, which he sends via text or email. That’s it.
In fact, it annoys his greatly that the phone has all the other “crap” on it. This lead to his rather humorous short review.
He noted that if he had to get a smartphone, he probably should have gotten an iPhone but he knew a new one was coming out soon (he got the new phone right before the iPhone 5 launch) — and again, the Android phone was free. (Yes, the iPhone 3GS would also have been free, but again, the line was about to be updated).
Michael Lopp:
Apple is eventually doomed. Yes, the most valuable company on the planet will slowly fade into stagnant mediocrity. It will be replaced by something that they will not predict and they will not see coming. This horrifically efficient culling is a fact of life in technology because it is an industry populated by a demographic intent not on building a better mousetrap, but who avidly ask, “Why the hell do we need mousetraps?”
That’s exactly right. Yes, Apple will eventually fall because guess what? All companies do. But it won’t be because someone like Microsoft or Google builds a better tablet or smartphone. It will be because another company you’ve never heard of builds something that makes tablets and smartphones obsolete.
This is the main problem I have with all of the recent “Apple is failing” stories. All seem to imply that missteps will allow their big rivals to take over Apple’s position of power. That’s not going to happen.
That’s why Lopp’s last point is so important: while the ouster of Scott Forstall makes a ton of sense from an org perspective as it seem to make Apple more stable, maybe that’s not the best thing in the world for Apple going forward. If they’re going to defeat these unknown assailants with unknown products in the future, maybe Apple (and really, any company) needs some level of instability to keep the creative juices flowing. At the very least, it makes it hard for anyone to know what and how to attack.
Given how much trouble Microsoft has had breaking into the smartphone market despite having and spending all the money in the world, I’m sure HP will be fine coming to the table in 2014.
If you believe Microsoft was late to the game, HP will be arriving in the fourth quarter down twenty touchdowns.
